In order to enable the provision and/or management of storage capacity at a per-virtual machine (VM) level of granularity, a virtual volume (vvol) storage environment may be presented to a virtualization system. In such a vvol storage environment, a set of storage resources of a storage system may be presented to the virtualization system as a vvol datastore, via one or more layers of abstraction. The virtualization system may create vvols within the vvol datastore and make those vvols available for use by VMs running within the virtualization system. Support for the abstraction associated with implementation of the vvol storage environment may be provided by an intermediary framework, within which various types of metadata may be retained during the course of ongoing operation.